Black invisibility on a Brazilian ‘frontier’: land and identity in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil

ABSTRACT

This article centers attention on race, place, and space as co-produced concepts that reveal much about both how racial ideology operates and is constituted in contemporary Brazil. In Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, the ethno-racial order constructs the region as devoid of colonized people and consummately available for capital-intensive agribusiness production. Land protests in Mato Grosso do Sul by black and indigenous activists undermine popular fantasies of racial harmony embedded in Brazilian-ness. The regional variation of the latter denies the historical and contemporary presence of black Brazilians in narratives of the state’s founding and contemporary status as a ‘frontier’. This article argues that we may consider ‘coming out’ moments by blacks in the state as defiant counters, revealing identification processes that undermine the denial of full recognition of blacks as citizens.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• ethnicity
• space
• place
• Brazil

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 As Perry (2013) notes, many scholars overstate the ambiguity of race in Brazil. I reject this trap. As I will discuss below, the supposed ambiguity of race in Brazil is a critical part of the construction of Brazilian exceptionalism and how race is done in Brazil. In contrast to the performance of ambiguity, in practice black–white and Indian–non-Indian binaries operate to produce a highly unequal society in terms of both social indicators and outcomes.

2 Hall begins with the Derridean point that the constitution of identities always entails an exclusion of something, a violent casting out and setting apart in the establishment of two hierarchical poles of difference (Hall 2000, 18). In such a configuration, in which man–woman or white–black are examples, the first is equivalent to ‘human being’, unqualified/understood according to difference. ‘“Woman” or “black” are marked terms in contrast to the unmarked terms of “white” and “man”’ (18). The marked bodies arise from such hierarchical exclusions. The racialized body, like the gendered body, must be viewed as a site of performance, not in the sense of willed or intentional acts, but rather as an effect of an ideology that works through such hierarchical exclusions.

3 I use the term ‘Indian’ in this paper, translated from the Portuguese ‘indio’, to refer to indigenous people primarily because this is the term that they themselves used over the course of my fieldwork. It is the most common term in the Brazilian context to refer to indigenous people.

4 This incorporates, by extension, categories of pardo, mulato, and myriad others, delineating gradations between branco and negro that I will discuss below in more detail.

5 Arguably, the term multiculturalism is out of place here. The processes that I describe are effectively multiculturalist and have been labeled such by Brazilian scholars (cf. Ernandes 2009), though the term itself may not be widely used in Brazil.

6 Quilombos are communities descended from escaped African slaves. The 1988 constitution authorizes titles granted to these communities for lands historically occupied by them.

7 Violence against indigenous protest leaders has been precipitous. For example, there occurred 19 homicides of indigenous protest leaders in 2004, 28 in 2005, 27 in 2006, and 53 in 2007 (United Nations 2009).

8 Branco (White) in Dourados may refer to any nonindigenous person regardless of ethno-racial identifications (see Mitchell, this volume).

9 Although numerical figures are available from Brazil’s Institute for Geography and Statistics’ (IGBE) National Research for Sample of Domiciles (PNAD), these numbers require a skeptical approach for at least two reasons. First, they rely on self-reporting, which as I discuss in this article, is an incredibly fraught means by which to decipher the racial make-up of the society. It is difficult at first glance to even determine the meanings of the racial categories presented in the census. Second, the numbers are distracting for the arguments made here because of the disjuncture between how one sees oneself and is seen, a point that I will make in detail in this article. However, for the sake of sharing the data, note that the PNAD census offers the following figures for the state of Mato Grosso do Sul: 1,157,000 whites (51.78%), 1,056,000 pardos (multiple categories including caboclo, mulato, etc.) (44.51%), 122,000 blacks (5.15%), 20,000 Indian people (0.84%), and 15,000 Asians (0.64%) (IGBE 2010).

10 Part of the Mato Grosso do Sul’s Movimento Negro (Black Movement) activism aims to draw attention to the black population and the existence of racism in the state. For example, this takes the form of agitating for inclusion of black Brazilians in the state’s school history textbooks. Antônio Borges dos Santos, coordinator for the Permanent Forum for the Movimento Negro and President of the Institute for Afro-Brazilian Culture proclaimed,

We are fighting so that the history of Africa and of black people in Brazil is entered into the school curriculum. People who don’t have their history recognized are nothing. It is a way of saying that they do not exist. (Campo Grande News 2011)

Original text: ‘Estamos lutando para que a história da África e do negro no Brasil entre no currículo escolar. O povo que não tem sua história reconhecida não é nada. Isso é uma forma de dizer que nós não existimos.’

11 My experiences matched those documented by Twine (1998) and Telles (2004) of an absence of extreme residential racial segregation in Brazilian cities. Importantly, however, neither of those authors worked in the context of urban Indian reservations. Dourados’ residential segregation with the city-reservation distinction resonates with the common saying in the state that ‘o lugar do indio é na reserva’ (the place for the Indian is on the reservation). Additionally, as Borges (n.d.) notes, we must explain historically how even moderate (as compared with US ‘hyper-segregation’) levels of segregation have increased and evolved from prior periods of relatively less segregation, as in the case of São Paulo (citing Andrews 1991).

12 Original text,

Em Mato Grosso do Sul, frequentemente se observa pessoas a dizer que deveríamos ter feito aqui o que teria sido feito nos Estados Unidos com os povos indígenas de lá: aniquilação total! Segundo alguns pensam, ou querem fazer crer, naquele país o General Custer (George Armstrong Custer) teria exterminado por completo a população indígena daquele país no século XIX, quando comandou o Sétimo Regimento de Cavalaria e fez guerra contra vários povos indígenas. (Oliveira 2012)

13 See, for example, Hanchard (1994) on the history of black consciousness and militancy in Brazil.